As reg­u­lar read­ers of the Bre­mer Sprach­blog know, the lan­guages of the world are dis­ap­pear­ing at an alarm­ing rate (see for exam­ple here, here, here, here, here, and here). Accord­ing to the most con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mates, at least half of the 6,500 lan­guages cur­rent­ly spo­ken will become extinct by the end of the cen­tu­ry (by the way, if you’re won­der­ing why I am address­ing you in Eng­lish today, please bear with me — I have a point to make).

When lin­guists draw atten­tion to this mass extinc­tion, they nat­u­ral­ly por­tray it as some­thing bad. This neg­a­tive eval­u­a­tion seems so nat­ur­al to us, that we are often sur­prised when oth­ers disagree.

Last week, a sto­ry from the forth­com­ing issue of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic on the top­ic of lan­guage death was tak­en up in the Amer­i­can press, for exam­ple in the New York Times, the Los Ange­les Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post. While the specifics of that sto­ry have not met with the whole­heart­ed approval of all lin­guists, in the end we prob­a­bly all agree that there is no such thing as bad pub­lic­i­ty when it comes to rais­ing pub­lic aware­ness of lan­guage death.

Then again, it is not as sim­ple as that. Because while the sto­ry raised pub­lic aware­ness to some extent, not all mem­bers of the pub­lic were auto­mat­i­cal­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the cause of sav­ing lan­guages from extinc­tion. For exam­ple, the sci­ence jour­nal­ist and blog­ger Raz­ib Khan took up the sto­ry in his blog Gene Expres­sion. He acknowl­edges that when a lan­guage is lost, so is part of the his­to­ry of the peo­ple who spoke it. But, he argues, in the end “the fun­da­men­tal truths that we val­ue as human beings is [sic] extant in sto­ries which tran­scend the par­tic­u­lar speech in which they are trans­mit­ted”. In oth­er words, lan­guage loss may not be desir­able, but it is noth­ing to lose sleep over.

His post is fair­ly mod­er­ate and care­ful­ly argued and so his posi­tion may seem quite plau­si­ble. How­ev­er, it is based on at least two implic­it assump­tions: first, that lan­guage is a neu­tral car­ri­er of infor­ma­tion, and sec­ond, that lan­guage has no val­ue beyond the infor­ma­tion that it is used to express.

Khan and two oth­er com­menters then come up with a the­o­ry that is sup­posed to explain why lan­guages become extinct. Khan him­self claims that “most local lan­guages die because peo­ple choose no longer to speak them (his empha­sis). Com­menter pcon­roy agrees and says that “[f]or most peo­ple the smart thing to do is to learn the lan­guage of the elite in their region or coun­try — espe­cial­ly when one is impov­er­ished or fight­ing to sur­vive at all”. And jim goes one step fur­ther and hails lan­guage loss as a mark of progress.

The extinc­tion of lan­guages is a good thing. Becom­ing flu­ent in one of the dom­i­nant lan­guages opens up the world of knowl­edge, mak­ing peo­ple more effi­cient and pro­duc­tive. You can’t become a (real) doc­tor or engi­neer know­ing only Nava­jo, for example.

Leav­ing aside the ques­tion, why one can­not become a doc­tor or engi­neer as a mono­ligual speak­er of Nava­jo, and leav­ing aside the ques­tion whether giv­ing up a lan­guage is ever a “choice” that peo­ple make, all three state­ments make sense as the­o­ries of lan­guage death only if we make an addi­tion­al assump­tion: that peo­ple can only speak one lan­guage, and there­fore must aban­don their orig­i­nal lan­guage if they want to learn Eng­lish (or some oth­er “dom­i­nant language”).

After I pro­voked him a tiny bit, jim was will­ing to go even fur­ther and posit a direct link between lan­guage death and eco­nom­ic well-being:

The last sev­er­al hun­dred years have seen a great uptick in lan­guage extinc­tions. At the same time mankind’s mate­r­i­al con­di­tion has improved immense­ly. The fact that trade and spe­cial­iza­tion is hard­er in a Tow­er of Babel world divid­ed up into tiny lan­guage com­mu­ni­ties is a plau­si­ble fac­tor. The regions of the world with the great­est lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty (say, Papua New Guinea) tend to also be the poorest.

Apart from the obvi­ous fact that the peo­ple whose mate­r­i­al con­di­tion has improved are not the same as the peo­ple who were forced to give up their lan­guages (look at the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­ines if you want a text-book exam­ple), there is anoth­er assump­tion under­ly­ing this state­ment: that speak­ing a sin­gle lan­guage guar­an­tees suc­cess­ful communication.

Let us briefly look at each of these four assump­tions in turn. We will find that none of them holds water.

1. A lan­guage is a neu­tral car­ri­er of information

Peo­ple often assume that a com­mu­nica­tive act begins with a par­tic­u­lar piece of infor­ma­tion that exists in some speaker’s head, inde­pen­dent­ly of lan­guage. The speak­er then takes that piece of infor­ma­tion, encodes it in lan­guage, and com­mu­ni­cates it to anoth­er speak­er. The oth­er speak­er hears or reads the lan­guage, decodes it, and ends up with the orig­i­nal, lan­guage-inde­pen­dent piece of information.

This mod­el is over­ly sim­plis­tic in many ways, of which I will only dis­cuss one: lan­guages are struc­tured in ways that encour­age speak­ers to pay atten­tion to par­tic­u­lar aspects of a par­tic­u­lar piece of infor­ma­tion. As an exam­ple, take an event where some­thing moves to some loca­tion in some way. The act of mov­ing is nat­u­ral­ly encod­ed by a verb. Inter­est­ing­ly, how­ev­er, lan­guages dif­fer in the kind of motion verbs they have.

In the Ger­man­ic lan­guages (like Ger­man or Dutch) and the Slav­ic lan­guages (like Russ­ian or Pol­ish), most motion verbs encode a par­tic­u­lar way of mov­ing (take Ger­man laufen “walk”, fahren “dri­ve”, schwim­men “swim”, ren­nen “run”, kriechen “crawl”, etc.). In con­trast, in the Romance lan­guages (like French or Span­ish), most motion verbs encode a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion of motion (take Span­ish entrar “enter”, salir “exit”, subir “go up”, bajar “go down”, etc.).

This means that when speak­ers of a Ger­man­ic lan­guage encode a motion event, they must pay atten­tion to the man­ner of motion, since oth­er­wise they would not know which verb to choose. The direc­tion, in con­trast, is encod­ed in a prepo­si­tion­al phrase (like in, into the room, or to Bre­men). This prepo­si­tion­al phrase is often option­al (it can be left out), which means that speak­ers can, but do not have to, pay atten­tion to the direc­tion of motion. For speak­ers of a Romance lan­guage, the sit­u­a­tion is reversed. Since Romance motion verbs encode direc­tion­al­i­ty, a speak­er of a Romance lan­guage must pay atten­tion to direc­tion in order to choose a verb. The man­ner, in con­trast, is encod­ed by a par­tici­ple, which, like the prepo­si­tion­al phras­es just men­tioned, can be left out. Thus, speak­ers of a Romance lan­guage can, but do not have to, pay atten­tion to man­ner of motion.

And indeed, the psy­cholin­guist Dan Slobin from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley and his col­leagues and col­lab­o­ra­tors have shown that speak­ers of Romance lan­guages con­sid­er it more impor­tant to talk about direc­tion of motion while speak­ers of Ger­man­ic lan­guages con­sid­er it more impor­tant to talk about man­ner of motion. For exam­ple, even when they are trans­lat­ing from a Ger­man­ic lan­guage, Span­ish trans­la­tors often leave out man­ner infor­ma­tion and add infor­ma­tion about direc­tion­al­i­ty, and Ger­man trans­la­tors leave out direc­tions and add man­ner infor­ma­tion when trans­lat­ing from a Romance lan­guage. Clear­ly, then, lan­guage is not a neu­tral car­ri­er of information.

Some lin­guists and anthro­pol­o­gist are will­ing to go one step fur­ther: they argue that such lin­guis­tic dif­fer­ences can influ­ence not just what speak­ers con­sid­er more impor­tant in com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but also what speak­ers con­sid­er more impor­tant in per­cep­tion. In oth­er words, the fact that speak­ers of Romance lan­guages must pay atten­tion to the direc­tion, but not to the man­ner in which some­thing moves when they want to talk about it may shape their brain in such a way that they are more like­ly to pay atten­tion to direc­tion and dis­re­gard man­ner even when they are sim­ply watch­ing a motion event with no inten­tion of talk­ing about it (this is referred to as “lin­guis­tic rel­a­tiv­i­ty”, asso­ci­at­ed with the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry lin­guist Ben­jamin Lee Whorf and more recent­ly with the devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist John A. Lucy from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go). If this turns out to be true (and there is some evi­dence that sug­gests that it is, at least in some areas of thought), then this would of course be an even stronger argu­ment against the idea that lan­guages are neu­tral car­ri­ers of information.

Let us turn to the sec­ond assumption.

2. A lan­guage has no val­ue beyond the infor­ma­tion that it is used to express

Obvi­ous­ly, the speak­ers of a lan­guage are typ­i­cal­ly emo­tion­al­ly attached to that lan­guage. On this blog, we often ridicule Ger­man lan­guage purists who take the exis­tence of a few Eng­lish loan­words as evi­dence for the impend­ing extinc­tion of Ger­man. This ridicule is well deserved and we will con­tin­ue to point out that (a) many of these peo­ple have a hid­den agen­da that has noth­ing to do with lan­guage but every­thing to do with iso­la­tion­ism or even nation­al­ism and that (b) Ger­man is alive and kick­ing and could eas­i­ly swal­low ten times the cur­rent num­ber of Eng­lish loan­words with­out chok­ing on them. How­ev­er, the very irra­tional­i­ty of their fear of extinc­ton is evi­dence for their strong emo­tion­al attach­ment to the Ger­man language.

But this emo­tion­al attach­ment, impor­tant as it is to the speak­ers, is not even the main rea­son why sci­en­tists val­ue lan­guage. Their attempts to main­tain lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty is moti­vat­ed by the fact that each lan­guage is a unique source of information.

First, the vocab­u­lary of a lan­guage typ­i­cal­ly encodes a com­plex tax­on­o­my of objects in the world. For exam­ple, indige­nous peo­ples have a very exhaus­tive knowl­edge of plant and ani­mal species in their nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment — knowl­edge that may not pre­cise­ly match a biologist’s tax­on­o­my of these species but that is opti­mal­ly geared towards sur­vival in that envi­ron­ment and that would take decades to repli­cate inde­pen­dent­ly. Anthro­pol­o­gists are inter­est­ed in these tax­onomies because of the cul­tur­al assump­tions that are embed­ded in them. Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gists are inter­est­ed in these tax­onomies because they pro­vide evi­dence of gen­er­al, species-spe­cif­ic psy­cho­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples that oper­ate in our per­cep­tion of the world around us. And even biol­o­gists are often inter­est­ed in these tax­onomies because they pro­vide them with a mas­sive head­start when cat­a­logu­ing ani­mals or plants in a par­tic­u­lar part of the world.

Sec­ond, as was point­ed out above, many anthro­pol­o­gists and lin­guists now believe that the struc­ture of a lan­guage can have an influ­ence on the way in which its speak­ers per­ceive the world. But lan­guage struc­ture clear­ly does not deter­mine our per­cep­tion of the world, and if we want to under­stand how the human mind works, we must find out which aspects of lan­guage struc­ture influ­ence our per­cep­tion and which don’t and to what extent such an influ­ence is pos­si­ble. The more lan­guages become extinct, the few­er poten­tial data points we have for study­ing these ques­tions and the more incom­plete the final pic­ture will be.

Third, lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty pro­vides impor­tant data even for lin­guists who deny that lan­guage struc­ture has any influ­ence what­so­ev­er on our per­cep­tion of the world. There is good evi­dence by now that there are lin­guis­tic uni­ver­sals — prop­er­ties that are nec­es­sar­i­ly shared by all human lan­guages and that must there­fore reflect gen­er­al psy­cho­log­i­cal or even neu­ro­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples. In order to uncov­er these uni­ver­sals, we need as much lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty as pos­si­ble, because the few­er lan­guages we can look at, the greater the dan­ger that we will mis­tak­en­ly clas­si­fy some prop­er­ty as a uni­ver­sal. For exam­ple, if the only lan­guages left were Chi­nese, Eng­lish, Span­ish and Russ­ian, we might be tricked into believ­ing that all lan­guages must have Sub­ject-Verb-Object as their basic word order. But in fact, all six pos­si­ble orders are found among the lan­guages of the world and Sub­ject-Verb-Object is not even the most fre­quent one (it is found in 41 per­cent of the world’s lan­guages while Sub­ject-Object-Verb is found in 47 percent).

One could argue, of course, that we have no right to expect peo­ple to speak a lan­guage that hin­ders their eco­nom­ic suc­cess sim­ply because anthro­pol­o­gists, lin­guists and psy­chol­o­gists need these lan­guages as data. And of course one would be right in argu­ing so. How­ev­er, no sci­en­tist wants to stop any­one from learn­ing a new lan­guage that opens up new pos­si­bil­i­ties. This brings us to the next assumption.

3. Peo­ple can only speak one lan­guage, and there­fore they must aban­don their orig­i­nal lan­guage if they want to learn an eco­nom­i­cal­ly dom­i­nant language

If this assump­tion were true, this post could not exist. The fact that I was able to write Monday’s post in Ger­man and that I will write Sunday’s post in Ger­man, but that I wrote today’s post in Eng­lish, and the fact that all reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog are able to under­stand all of these posts, shows that peo­ple can quite eas­i­ly com­mu­ni­cate in one lan­guage with­out giv­ing up the oth­er (in fact, that was the entire point of writ­ing this in Eng­lish). Now, you might argue that this is because we are all high­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple. But in fact, the major­i­ty of the world’s pop­u­la­tion is mul­ti­lin­gual. In many regions of the world, peo­ple could not even com­mu­ni­cate with their neigb­hors in the next vil­lage if they were not mul­ti­lin­gual, and this has noth­ing to do with edu­ca­tion. Chil­dren who grow up in con­tact with sev­er­al lan­guages will learn all of these lan­guages as eas­i­ly as they would learn a sin­gle language.

4. Speak­ing a sin­gle lan­guage guar­an­tees suc­cess­ful communication

This assump­tion is so obvi­ous­ly false that there is litte to say about it. I will mere­ly repeat, in slight­ly more detail, some­thing that com­menter John Emer­son already point­ed out in the Gene Expres­sion thread: there is no cor­re­la­tion at all between speak­ing a com­mon lan­guage and com­mu­ni­cat­ing suc­cess­ful­ly. Protes­tants and Catholics in North­ern Ire­land have both spo­ken Eng­lish through­out the thir­ty-year con­flict that cost more than 3,500 lives. Serbs and Croats fought vicious­ly against each oth­er in the last decade of the 20th cen­tu­ry despite the fact that they speak close­ly relat­ed dialects of the same lan­guage. Switzer­land, on the oth­er hand, has four offi­cial lan­guages but has not seen a civ­il war since 1848 (and that war — sur­prise, sur­prise — was about reli­gion, not about lan­guage). The Euro­pean nations have fought against each oth­er through­out their entire record­ed his­to­ry, and they were final­ly able to break this destruc­tive pat­tern not by adopt­ing a com­mon lan­guage but by cre­at­ing what is, in essence, a peace­ful and wealthy, but stub­born­ly mul­ti­lin­gual super-state based on com­mon val­ues — a super-state whose gov­ern­ing insti­tu­tions spend up to a third of their bud­get on trans­la­tion services.

In sum, then, each lan­guage is a car­ri­er of a cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, cul­ture-spe­cif­ic knowl­edge, and a par­tic­u­lar way of pay­ing atten­tion to the world around us. It may even turn out to be a fil­ter through which we per­ceive the world in the first place. And it is evi­dence for the pos­si­ble forms that human lan­guages are made of. As such, each lan­guage is a fun­da­men­tal part of its speak­ers’ iden­ti­ties as well as an irre­place­able piece of data for anthro­pol­o­gists, psy­chol­o­gists, lin­guists, and many oth­er sci­en­tists inter­est­ed in lan­guage, cul­ture and cognition.

Since peo­ple can learn more than one lan­guage, speak­ers of small lan­guages need not be in any way dis­ad­van­taged as com­pared to speak­ers of one of the dom­i­nant world lan­guages. There­fore, noth­ing can pos­si­bly be gained by encour­ag­ing, entic­ing or forc­ing speak­ers to give up their lan­guage in favor of Eng­lish, Russ­ian, Span­ish, Ara­bic or Man­darin Chi­nese. But every­thing can be lost.

[Note: I will add some ref­er­ences to this post over the next few days, but for now I just want to get it out there].